I do try and avoid commenting on news stories on this blog. Others do it perfectly well. But this is a doozy.

You may have noticed that blink-and-you’ll-miss-him White House Director of Communications Anthony Scarramucci lasted 10 days in the post.

What emerged in the last 24-hours is a draft comms plan posted by a blogger sympathetic to Scarramucci. You can read it here. You can also read Buzzfeed’s confirmation that this is not fake news and also a take down of it here. I suggest you do. It’s jaw-droppingly bad.

Bad comms plans and Bob Dylan

Sure, it is in draft format. But it appears an unstructured list. Poorly thought through. With not much sense of direction. No evaluation. Like Bob Dylan in ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ it has no direction at all.

Good comms plans

Good comms plans involve a round table of input from people you want to work with. They are strategy and they are the tactics of how to do it.

They look at where you are now, where you want to go, what the one thing is you’d like people to do, who you’d like to talk to, where they hang out, what time and money you have and how you are going to evaluate. You can add who you are going to tell you are doing this and a timeline for the things you’ll do too.

There are many comms planning templates. This one is mine. You are free to use it.

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